


Firestarter

by SectoBoss



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Flamethrower, Gen, Giants, Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-18
Updated: 2015-03-18
Packaged: 2018-03-18 11:47:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3568508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SectoBoss/pseuds/SectoBoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Due to a shipping mix-up Emil gets his hands on military-grade weaponry. The local giants are not happy with the results.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was dreamt up and written down a few days before chapter six started up and we found out what was actually in those crates. Now I suppose it's an AU. Anyway, I'm putting it up here before any more of it gets disproved!

“Mikkel, you got a moment?” Sigrun asked, popping her head in through the open door of the tank. 

Mikkel looked up from the desk and put down the book he had been thumbing idly through. “Considering the alternative to whatever you’re about to propose is reading up on how to improve my golf swing, I’d say my time is just about worthless right now. What is it?” 

Sigrun furrowed her brow and looked around the interior of the tank. “Sure there’s not something else you could do? Put tonight’s dinner on?” 

“Already did.” 

“Try and get ahold of someone one the radio?” 

“Still nothing but black noise.” 

“…Swab the toilet?” 

“You could eat tonight’s dinner off it.” 

“Wow,” Sigrun smirked, leaning against the doorframe. “I heard rumours about you all being poor down in Bornholm but I didn’t think it was so bad you couldn’t afford tables.” 

Mikkel snorted and gave the captain a mock-glare. “What did you want?” he asked. 

“I need your help with our second supply crate,” Sigrun replied, jerking her head back towards the cargo compartment of the tank. “Someone’s sealed it shut with the strength of a thousand men and neither me nor Emil can get it open.” 

This was one of those situations where Mikkel knew that no question was too stupid to ask. “You did try using a crowbar, didn’t you?” 

“Of course we did! What, do you think Private Hairstyle back there tried to rip it open with his bare hands?” Sigrun paused, realising that it was worryingly easy to imagine a situation where Emil, backed into a corner by his own bravado and desire to impress, might try to do just that. “It’s nailed shut five times over and we can barely get the crowbar under the lid. Give us a hand, would you?” 

Mikkel sighed and pushed himself up from his chair. Truth be told, he was glad for any interruption to the daily routine at this point. For almost a week now they had been stalled on the outskirts of Copenhagen. The first couple of raids they’d done had been unqualified successes with Sigrun, Emil and Lalli coming back to the tank laden with books and grins plastered all over their faces. Well, Sigrun and Emil had been grinning – Lalli just wore that same dour expression he’d had on him since Mikkel had got Tuuri to explain that because he’d eaten all of the gingerbread biscuits in one go there wouldn’t be any more until they got back to civilisation. But after those first few victories they’d hit a run of bad luck. Promised treasure troves had turned out to be duds, the tank had started to develop the odd mechanical fault here and there, and to cap it all the last place they’d hit had turned out to be a nest. Lalli and Sigrun had picked up a couple of injuries from that one. Nothing he couldn’t fix, but still. 

All in all, the enthusiasm that had marked their first couple of days was definitely ebbing. Mikkel didn’t much mind that, and nor did Sigrun from what he could tell. They’d been through this kind of thing before and they knew that every expedition has its high and low points. It was the youngsters he was more worried about. They could do with some good news soon. 

“Let’s have a look at it then,” he said, following Sigrun round to the cargo hold. They had to step around Tuuri and Lalli to get there. Tuuri was kneeling elbow-deep in some part of the tank’s tread mechanisms and muttering to herself in Finnish, stopping every now and then to retrieve a wrench or a spanner from the ground next to her with oil-stained hands. Lalli sat propped up against the tank’s hull next to her, quite asleep despite his cousin’s grumblings and the clatter of her work. Tuuri looked up and gave him a little smile-and-wave as he passed by. _Holding together better than the other two_ , Mikkel noted, returning her smile. 

“What’s even in this crate that needs nailing down so much?” he asked as the two of them rounded the corner. Emil, slouched against the offending crate with a gloomy expression, glanced up from a piece of paper he was squinting at. 

“No idea,” Emil said. “I… can’t really read this shipping manifest. It’s all in Icelandic. But it should be basic supplies, right? Food, water, ammo that kind of thing. Nothing that needs this much securing, I’m sure. Probably some dumb Dane got too carried away with a hammer back on the base… no offense, Mikkel,” he added quickly. 

Mikkel just harrumphed and gently shoved Emil to one side. Sigrun handed him the crowbar the two of them had been using and he tapped it around the underside of the crate’s lid, trying to find a weak spot he could use to get some leverage. He found such a spot, positioned the crowbar just right and shoved down hard – only to be rewarded with the sound of splintering wood as the crowbar slipped and chewed a hole through the lid. 

Over the next ten minutes Mikkel slowly prised the lid off and Sigrun and Emil gained a working knowledge of how to swear in Danish. At last the remnants of the lid came loose and the three of them crowded round the crate, eager to find out what had caused them so much trouble. 

It wasn’t what they had expected, although it was what one of them had dreamed of. 

“What the…?” 

“Is that…?” 

Sigrun stared down into the crate like it was one of those magic-eye woodcuts that would make sense if she looked at it for long enough. But no matter how hard she looked at it, the contents of the crate were not the tinned supplies, water purification tablets, spare batteries and extra ammo she knew ought to be in there. Instead, sealed inside a thick transparent bag was a huge, bulky gun with what looked like a metallic egg hanging off it where the clip ought to have been. Five more of these eggs nestled in cartons of fireproof plastic like the nest of some enormous mechanical chicken. To complete the package, someone had shoved a pair of heavy black rubber gloves and a lensed, hollow-eyed gas mask into the corner of the box. 

It took her a few seconds to find her voice, and another second to remember to raise it over the sound of Emil’s gleeful giggles. “So… so on a mission to recover books… flammable books, made of paper that burns _really well_ … those four dumbasses gave us a _flamethrower?_ ” 

And as Emil dissolved into fits of manic laughter between them, loud enough that Tuuri and Lalli poked their heads round the cargo door in worry, Sigrun and Mikkel shared an almost telepathic realisation: _we cannot let this Swedish madman get his hands on this thing_.


	2. Chapter 2

Emil Vasterstrom grinned beneath the thick rubber and ceramic casing of his mask. Jittering and jumping shapes reflected madly off the tinted lenses shielding his eyes as fire leaped from his hands. It was like the old nursery rhyme, he thought: we can’t go over them, we can’t go under them, we can’t go around them – _so we’ll have to go through them_. 

He hefted the flamethrower he carried and squeezed the trigger again, washing down the basement room in front of him with another scorching blast. Three seconds on the trigger, conserve fuel, remember that the fire will spread of its own accord so send it where it can grow rather than where you need it to end up. The cleanser’s mantras rang through his head, hammered into him during basic training back in Sweden by a heavyset captain who could have given that Danish admiral a run for his money when it came to volume. Burn the building down fast enough so that nothing nasty escapes, but not so fast your squad can’t. 

Something half-formed writhed in a puddle of fire and mewled in agony. Emil torched it without a second thought before turning his flames onto some supporting columns and struts on the basement’s ceiling which were half overgrown with meat. The flesh blackened and shrivelled at the fire’s caress, wailing and retreating to reveal the wood beneath which in turn began to char and crumble. Emil gave it ten minutes before the whole basement came down around them. 

Now would be an excellent time to leave. 

He turned around to face the two figures stood behind him, framed in the doorway that led up out of the basement to the atrium. They had figured that this building had been a small hotel before the rash came – whereupon it had become a nest for the trolls that had been harassing them for the past two days. Whatever it had been, though, it was about to become a pyre. Sigrun and Lalli stood squinting back at him from the door, their hands raised to protect their faces from the intense heat of the fire. Emil raised his own hand and made a chopping motion towards the door, the internationally recognised gesture for _let’s get out of here_. In return Sigrun gave him a thumbs-up and turned towards the door, her knife at the ready. Lalli made to follow her and then stopped, frozen midstride, his expression suddenly fearful. Emil saw his mouth open in a shout that was drowned out by the roar of the flames and the thick material of Emil’s gas mask, saw his arm raise to point at Emil – no, behind Emil, at the fire, at what was coming _out_ of the fire. 

Emil spun on his heel just in time to see the wall of flames behind him flex, bulge and billow outwards. A mass of flesh and gristle heaved itself out of the inferno, skin cracking and eyeballs melting, and charged screaming towards him. Strong legs that may once have been arms propelled it forward and it bore down on him alarmingly fast for its bulk. Blistered and rotted tongues lashed out towards him. Fear sizzled down Emil’s spine like a lightning bolt as his blood filled with adrenaline and he gave a shout of surprise that was muffled by his gas mask into an indignant squawk. He squeezed the trigger for all he was worth and was rewarded with the comforting judder of the flamethrower’s pump through his thick gloves. The blast caught the troll full in the face and it staggered sidewise with a howl, clawing at the fire that was eating into it. Blindly it groped towards Emil in a desperate attempt to find him, kill him, make it all stop. 

The doctrine of the three-second burn went right out the window as Emil burned the troll with the last of the fuel in the canister, cremating it down to the bone. By the time he was finished he was grinning again under the mask. The flamethrower gave a last asthmatic gasp and went cold. He almost felt sorry for the poor troll as he smacked the release switch on the flamethrower’s barrel and the spent canister clattered to the ground. But how could it have realised what it was up against? Not some easy meal, he thought as he yanked another canister out of his belt and loaded it into the port under the barrel. Hiss-click went the mechanism as fuel started to cycle through the weapon again. Not some second-rate cleanser who nearly flunked basic training! Not some fat kid whose classmates always picked on him! It had gone for Emil Vasterstrom, and did it ever regret it! Right there and then he decided that when he got back to Sweden and wrote a bestselling book, this bit would be one of the highlights.

A hand gripped his shoulder and he was spun around to face Sigrun’s best I’m-about-to-get-angry face. The woman managed to look him in the eye through half a centimetre of tinted pyrex lenses and gave him a look that screamed _are you quite finished?_ She jerked her thumb over her shoulder towards the door behind her and Emil meekly nodded. Behind Sigrun Lalli’s eyes glittered in the flames, a faraway look on the young mage’s face. 

Emil suddenly became aware that the floor beneath his boots was trembling. 

He had barely taken two steps towards the door when the concrete below him exploded and he was sent flying. He span through the air in a cloud of debris like a discarded ragdoll and smacked head-first into hard concrete. Galaxies of stars span behind his eyes and agony flared in his ribcage as one of the fuel canisters strapped to his torso dug into him. Groaning in pain, he rolled onto his back and looked blearily back towards where he had been stood as chunks of rubble and mortar pattered down around him like stone rain. Something, in amongst the fire and the twisted rebar and snapped concrete, was emerging. 

It defied description. A tide of meat and organs and bone, a thicket of scrabbling limbs and rattling ribcages and dripping tentacles, a carcass of the old world wrenching itself up out of the depths of the earth. Some ancient god awoken from its slumber, livid at the fire these three puny morsels had started. This building hadn’t been a troll’s nest at all, Emil realised with horror as the thing before him unfurled itself. It was a giant’s hatchery. The things he had burned were children – and here came the parent. His vision began to blur and dim and he willed it to fade faster, desperately hoping that he would be gone by the time that thing reached him. 

Something caught him in a vice’s grip and hauled him upright. Terror sparked through him. _Oh Gods don’t let me become a part of that thing_ he whimpered to deities he didn’t believe in, although all that came out of his mouth was a little sob. Distorted shapes swam before his cracked lenses, red fire, red meat, white bone, grey stone… he staggered in the grip of whatever had him and stumbled backwards. _I don’t want to die_ \- 

Something cold and hard and metal was shoved into his hands. Blinking in surprise, his vision finally clearing, Emil looked down and saw the flamethrower resting in his arms. He hadn’t even noticed he’d dropped it. Still grasping it around the upper barrel with one scrawny hand, and supporting Emil by the shoulder with the other, was Lalli. Maybe it was a trick of the firelight, but Emil could have sworn his eyes were glowing a bright electric-blue. Without saying a word, or even taking his hand off the barrel of the flamethrower, he stood to one side to allow Emil a clear line of fire. 

Everything suddenly became very clear for Emil. Here was the flamethrower, brimming with fuel and raring to be let loose. There was the giant, its arms thrashing and heads wailing as it lunged towards the three of them. And everything else – from the red roar to his right as Sigrun unloaded half a clip into one of the giant’s faces, to the blue shine from the left as Lalli turned and yelled something in that incomprehensible language of his – was utterly superfluous. 

He pulled the trigger. 

Immediately he realised something was wrong. The pump, instead of its normal whine, started to howl louder and louder. The flamethrower bucked and jerked in his hands like a captured animal and fire poured from the nozzle in a mad torrent. Emil swore. He’d been told about this in basic, but never expected to see one. It was called an overdrive, when the pump controls were damaged and just span faster and faster. The end result was a massive fireball that either consumed all the oxygen in a room or exploded outwards if it happened outdoors. Either way, a flame trooper who got overdrive rarely lived to tell the tale. Desperately he squeezed the trigger again and again, trying to stop the mechanism, but to no avail. The deluge from the nozzle continued, blue and superhot. 

_Oh well,_ he thought madly to himself. _Better burned than eaten._

It is said that in the final seconds of a person’s life the brain goes into an overdrive of its own, desperately cataloguing as much of the surroundings as possible in a last-ditch attempt to find something it can use to survive. Survivors of near-death experiences report this as feeling like time has slowed down, and an odd sense of calm descending over them. Emil felt something like this now. He saw Sigrun to his right, eyes full of demented determination, driving a knife through something that might once have been a person’s face as an arm clawed at her side. He felt a wind on his back, strong and fast, air being sucked ( _or guided?_ ) down from the outside to feed the fireball. He watched as the flames splashed across the giant’s skin, lapping up its flesh. He heard the screech of the monster’s torment, felt the shudder of its anguish in his chest. And he watched as Lalli, one gloved hand still clutching the red-hot barrel and the other now outstretched towards the giant, gestured and pointed as he chanted inaudibly – and the fire responded. 

Emil looked on slack-jawed as tendrils of fire splintered from the main jet. Wherever Lalli motioned, a new branch split off and hurled itself at its quarry. The giant howled and snatched its limbs back, corralled by the heat. The fire became some molten predator ensnaring its prey. The wind at Emil’s back grew stronger as the fire burned hotter still, continuing to pour from the flamethrower even though the fuel should have been used up long ago. The giant tried to bat away the inferno from its skin but it might as well have tried to extinguish the sun. With one last gurgling wail it slowly collapsed, liquefied rivulets of meat running down its flanks. Whatever Lalli had been shouting seemed to reach a crescendo and he gave a final cry, eyes blazing bright, before he took his hand from the barrel and spread his arms wide. 

All at once the fire died and the room became dark and silent.


	3. Chapter 3

“You still haven’t told me what happened in there,” Mikkel said as the tank rumbled onwards. 

Emil winced as the medic applied some more foul-smelling ointment to the burn on the back of his hand. “We burned the nest,” he replied. “What else do you want me to say?” 

Mikkel arched an eyebrow at the young Swede, who was perched on one of the fold-down beds. “Of course,” he said as he replaced the burn cream into his doctor’s bag and fished around for some gauze. “You went down into that nest and took three times as long as you said you’d be. I was sat twenty metres away in the tank and I heard two explosions, what sounded like a building collapsing and something that was definitely not a troll. Then you three come out covered in enough injuries to hospitalise a platoon. I can’t put my finger on it, but something about your story just doesn’t ring true.” 

Emil said nothing as Mikkel expertly wrapped his wounded hand in gauze and taped the loose end down. It was a story he felt he might be able to tell in a few days’ time, after plenty of sleep and hot food. For now, he decided to play the dumb Swede card. 

“What? Mikkel, I’ve told you, speak slower.” 

Mikkel fixed Emil with an expression that told the young man he was fooling precisely no-one. “Never mind,” he sighed. “You’ll want to not use that hand for a day or two, and keep the bandage clean. In the meantime, get plenty of rest.” His stern features softened and he afforded Emil the smallest of smiles. “Whatever happened, I think you’ve earned that.” With that he stood up and ambled over towards the front of the tank’s crew compartment, where Sigrun lay slumped across the desk, snoring her head off. Picking up the golf book, he opened it where he’d left off and started to read. 

Emil meanwhile swung his legs up and lay back in the bunk. All at once the adrenaline of the past few hours seemed to leave him and he was left with a feeling of incredible tiredness – along with an increasingly familiar feeling of being watched. He glanced over to the opposite bunk. Sure enough Lalli was lying there watching him with that piercing stare of his, his face only just visible between his hair and the covers. 

“Hey, Lalli,” Emil smiled. “That was…” he paused searching for the right words, although he knew it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. “That was pretty cool, what you did back there. Thanks.” 

There was a long silence while Emil waited for Lalli to break his customary silence. He was about to give up and try and rest when Lalli suddenly grinned at him. He looked happier than Emil had seen him in a long time. 

“Hyvää yötä, Emil,” he whispered, then rolled over and went to sleep. 

”Umm... same to you,” Emil chuckled, before doing the same. 

That night they would both have the same dream of howling monsters and smothering darkness. But they weathered their nightmares well, for neither faced them alone.


End file.
